Green Room

Serious Human Beings

Even as the starting bell rings for the first round of the Republican presidential free-for-all, we’ve got a couple of anonymous Mitt Romney advisors coming off the top rope, aiming elbow smashes at Sarah Palin’s back. They said she’s “not a serious human being” and “if she’s standing up there in a debate, and the answers are more than 15 seconds long, she’s in trouble.”

This childish and incoherent nonsense does a lot more damage to Mitt Romney than Sarah Palin. What, exactly, are the criteria for being considered a “serious human being?” Should she just give up her half-hearted attempts at humanity and drop dead? I would think raising a Downs-syndrome child would earn her a certain degree of automatic credit for seriousness. It’s certainly not the kind of thing a frivolous human being would do. Romney should begin his campaign by firing anyone who maintains a Daily Kos diary.

The crack about fifteen-second debate answers is slightly more coherent, but utterly ridiculous. Anybody who can rock a sitting Presidential administration with Facebook posts has nothing to prove to the faceless minions of a voiceless bystander to the ObamaCare drama.

The contenders for the GOP nomination will need to take some shots at each other, but they need to do it without questioning the very humanity of prospective candidates who haven’t even declared yet. In case the Romney machine hasn’t noticed, Palin is popular with the Tea Party folks, who will be producing much of the grassroots energy during the 2012 election. Slouching into agreement with the laziest media caricatures of Big Mama Grizzly is not going to impress them.

Let me offer Romney, and the other GOP contenders hoping to climb into the steel cage with him and Palin, what we’re looking for in a serious candidate.

This election will not be fought over the fine details of a few specific pieces of legislation. It will not be a contest to find someone who can escort an unpopular Barack Obama from the White House, then trot back inside and continue shoveling trillions of dollars into the deficit furnace. We don’t need a national CPA to provide a lecture on deficit reduction during his inauguration, then return for a State of the Union speech in which he explains spending cuts are pretty much impossible, while forklifts roll in with massive new tax packages. We have no use for someone who thinks ObamaCare is an awesome machine that just needs a new transmission and some mag wheels to reach its potential.

We are about to conduct an election about the very philosophy of our government. It is our last chance to avoid the Great Crash which Obama has brought to our doorsteps… but which would have lurked twenty or thirty years in the future even without him. The Obama presidency has begun a fundamental transformation of the relationship between Americans and their government. The groundwork for this transformation was laid over many years, by politicians from both parties. Government bloat has accumulated for decades. The State isn’t really changing all that much under Barack Obama. It’s working to change us.

To reverse this process, we must reach farther back than the administrations of George Bush or Bill Clinton. We are being crushed by engines of regulation, taxation, and corruption that were designed in the first decades of the last century. We’re approaching the end of the story that began during the New Deal. It won’t be good enough to merely rewind the tape a few years. Even such a half-hearted measure, simply returning us to where George Bush left us, would be the most spectacular reduction of State power in our entire history… and it wouldn’t be good enough.

The Republican candidate for president must be determined and sober about the magnitude of the change facing us, but also able to draw strength from an enduring belief in the spirit and capability of the American people. It’s not hard to be a “happy warrior” when you stand in the front ranks of such a mighty force. Our candidate must understand the fatal flaws of Obama’s ideology, not just the weaknesses of individual bills he has supported. A comprehensive knowledge of America’s socialist history, from inception to its current death throes, will be required. The Republican candidate must be able to explain why individual Americans will succeed, where the State has failed. It will be necessary to describe the love of liberty to a people who don’t universally share it. They must learn to celebrate freedoms judged too dangerous for their feeble minds by the Democrat Party. They must learn to focus their will against a leviathan State that has no intention of dying quietly. Like Sarah Palin, they must be ready for their very humanity to be questioned, through dark insinuations of greed and racism.

We certainly do need some serious people to apply for the Oval Office job that will be opening in 2013. Mitt Romney disqualified himself when he failed to speak out against ObamaCare. Next, please.

Blowback

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Mitt Romney disqualified himself when he failed to speak out against ObamaCare. Next, please.

If there is truly justice anywhere in the world, Mitt Romney would have disqualified himself from ever holding public office again — up to and including Boston city dog catcher.

Romney failed to speak out against Obamacare because he’d have looked like a blithering moron trying to explain why it wasn’t good for the nation even though he signed it into law in mass-uh-chew-sits. I have no use for Mittens.

I have been hoping for just such a candidate to appear. The closest we have is Palin, but even she will need to start convincing the public we need to change Washington, not just continue as we are. Now would be a good time to start. As we gear up for the mid-terms, start getting the public ready for the changes we need to make.

But I fear even the Saracuda isn’t ready to tackle the entire socialist framework of the Democratic party and it’s followers. I long to hear her voice the concerns over a far too repreessive governmnet, and the virtues of a return to the ideals of freedom the founders laid out for us.

Perhaps I hope for too much. But I fear if we do not get a leader willing to fight the hard fight, it will soon be too late, and we will crushed by a governmnet too large to support.

A conservative Leader is, caps that, LEADER, is what is needed. We don’t necessarily need a PhD in economics, history, polysci, nor any other discipline. In fact, try to name a school outside of the military academies that offer a major in Leadership.

With this in mind, a curious human that has a broad reaching overview, that can seek out and draw disciplined, informed, patriots to help take on the tasks necessary to whittle down DC is what is needed. And who is a Patriot Leader themselves.

Name names. Call them out. I’m looking, listening. We’ve got a year to find them, max. Maybe that person is already a public figure, maybe not. But there is at least one around. Name names. Don’t have to be the same ones we’ve already heard before. Then we can all discuss, vote, and work for the best.

If only Palin had remained as Alaska’s governor I would have deemed her a serious candidate. When Obama was charged with having no executive experience at least Palin was governor for a short time. If she had remained governor and used the time to study international affairs while honing her executive skills, I’d take her seriously. But to be known only as an effective speaker just puts her on par with Obama. I certainly respect and admire Palin. I even share most of her philosophy. But we need someone with experience in the White House, not another Obama.

Wait, Dr. Zero. You’re trusting Time magazine to come up with a credible quote about a likely Republican candidate? Neither Romeny nor Palin benefit from such; even if said “advisor” thought such (and just who are Romney’s “advisors” at this point?), what interest would said advisor have in saying such?

Gee, if I wanted to harm both Romney and Palin, I would have created such a quote. Back in the Soviet days, that was called DISINFORMATION.

Puleeze!! What are you some troll? You might take the trouble to actually read some of Sarah’s foreign policy statements before you criticise them. Obviously you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Why did the Jersuleum Post’s Caroline Glick say she was the best friend to Isreal of any politician in the US? Why have numerous others who actually have read what she has said re: foreign policy been very impressed? Get a clue, learn to read, before you spout off and reveal your ignorance.

It also makes his advisors look inept (as opposed to merely mean-spirited). Are they insane? If Romney wants the Palin vote, he’s not going to get it by throwing cheap schoolyard dirt at Palin. He can’t win without that vote, and it’s much bigger on the right than the “Huh, We’re Too Smart For That Prole Palin.”

Sarah Palin is toxic. She is not a moron, but she is a rambling, chaotic, run-on sentence (I challenge you to read a transcript of any recent interview without pulling your hair out). She does not seem to be a deep or quick thinker, and she is not the person I want to lead us back from the snowballing statism that is picking up steam. And most of all, I fear that she is less “electable”, not because of her gender but because of the perception (by both the left and the right) that she is not overly bright.

I guess I have a soft spot for Sarah Palin because she made the choice to keep her baby, even after she knew that he was going to be born with Down syndrome. It’s easy for all of us to talk about being pro-life, but the fact of the matter is, I have a child with Down syndrome, and as much as I love her to pieces, one of the reasons that I DIDN’T have any testing done ahead of time is because I was afraid that I wasn’t noble enough to go through with a pregnancy if I knew that something might go wrong.

Do people not understand what kind of COURAGE it takes to make that decision? I mean, yeah, we all talk a good game, but unless you have BEEN there, you don’t really know if you have what it takes. When our daughter was born, a lot of the tears that were shed were because I didn’t know if I had the strength that I was sure it was going to take to be “that” kind of parent.

Trust me on this – ANYONE who sticks with a pregnancy, knowing what the Palins knew, has what it takes to be a leader. And every mom that I know who has a child with a disability has a servant’s heart – every last one of them will go to the mat for their kid. And what this country needs right now is someone who will fight to the death for the good of this country and her people.

And now Romney has Halperin trying to sabotage Palin.

The only candidate with testosterone on the current “short list” is Ms. Palin.

BTW, if anyone feels the need to light into her about being a “quitter”, then just remember who WORKED her way through college. Sometimes she had to quit back then because she ran out of money and didn’t have enough to pay for the next semester. But everytime that she had saved up enough to go back, SHE WENT BACK.

I am TIRED of the Democrat Party – working in collusion with the MSM – manipulating people into “choosing” the candidate that they think they have a shot at beating. Do you think that Mitt, Newt, or Huck could withstand the kind of abuse that Palin has endured the past 2 years? Would they still be around, or would they be cowering in a corner, sucking their thumb, and crying for their mommy?

That’s what I thought.

What this country needs right now is a courageous leader with a servant’s heart. We need to judge EVERY potential candidate by that standard.

Doesn’t surprise me to see Romney in on something like this. Always struck me as a weasel…made of plastic no less. As far as reforming government, Sarah Palin has a lot to prove.
Her record in Alaska along with her electrifying personality gave me hope. However, her continued presence at the side of John McCain, who is symbolic of the institutional arrogance and waste of our government tells me that she is in the process of learning all the wrong lessons about what to do once she gets to Washington. McCain’s behavior during amnesty, ie characterizing his opponents as stupid and bigoted because they disagree with him, as well as his assault on the first amendment with his McCain-Feingold legislation puts him solidly in the camp of ‘Do as I say and shut the f*ck up’ governance. If we truly are serious about reform, career hack politicians like John McCain need to be voted out. Young up and comers like Sarah Palin need to stay closer to their base and attack politicians like McCain.
Palin had the chance to let Arizona make a good decision and dump McCain. She made sure, personally, that this did not happen. That puts her squarely in the corner of business as usual in DC.
The Tea Party wants reform, while politicians just want to keep getting elected. Which is the priority? If it truly is reform, better find some better candidates. Lesser of two evils ain’t gonna cut it no more.

The Republican candidate for president must be determined and sober about the magnitude of the change facing us, but also able to draw strength from an enduring belief in the spirit and capability of the American people. It’s not hard to be a “happy warrior” when you stand in the front ranks of such a mighty force. Our candidate must understand the fatal flaws of Obama’s ideology, not just the weaknesses of individual bills he has supported. A comprehensive knowledge of America’s socialist history, from inception to its current death throes, will be required. The Republican candidate must be able to explain why individual Americans will succeed, where the State has failed. It will be necessary to describe the love of liberty to a people who don’t universally share it. They must learn to celebrate freedoms judged too dangerous for their feeble minds by the Democrat Party. They must learn to focus their will against a leviathan State that has no intention of dying quietly.

Everything you describe here is exactly what Sarah is, the traits and qualities she possesses.

She made sure, personally, that this did not happen. That puts her squarely in the corner of business as usual in DC.
The Tea Party wants reform, while politicians just want to keep getting elected. Which is the priority? If it truly is reform, better find some better candidates. Lesser of two evils ain’t gonna cut it no more.

austinnelly on July 16, 2010 at 12:28 PM

I have to disagree with you.

She had to endorse McCain. Loyalty, and the future are important there.

You must admit that JD Hayworth hasn’t exactly set the race on fire there. This may have factored in, that she found JD wanting when examining whether to stick with Johnny or sit it out. If there were a better primary challenger who had a good chance, she may have remained silent. I don’t think she would have endorsed against Johnny, in any case.

You must also consider the possibility that Johnny may learn some lessons from Sarah, which would be good for him. They are both backing up Gov Brewer after all.

She is %100 leading the charge against cap and trade, despite McCain having a similar plan in his ’08 platform.

She did publicly say she would “work on him” as pertains to ANWAR energy development. That may yet happen too.

Overall, she has been good for conservatives, good for the party getting new conservative blood with some momentum.

She may wind up being good for some of the old bulls that survive, telling them the kind of things we have been thinking the last few years.

Mitt Romney disqualified himself when he failed to speak out against ObamaCare. Next, please.

What a liar you are. Romney spoke out often against Obamacare. Don’t tell me you are one of the stupid people who doesn’t see the difference between an Obama federal takeover and a Romney state reform.

A comprehensive knowledge of America’s socialist history, from inception to its current death throes, will be required. The Republican candidate must be able to explain why individual Americans will succeed, where the State has failed.

To reverse this process, we must reach farther back than the administrations of George Bush or Bill Clinton. We are being crushed by engines of regulation, taxation, and corruption that were designed in the first decades of the last century. We’re approaching the end of the story that began during the New Deal. It won’t be good enough to merely rewind the tape a few years. Even such a half-hearted measure, simply returning us to where George Bush left us, would be the most spectacular reduction of State power in our entire history… and it wouldn’t be good enough.

Doc, that says it all right there! It’s where the disconnect happens. Too many think it only requires a rewind of a few years.

This election will not be fought over the fine details of a few specific pieces of legislation

We already have such politicans, in both parties, uet the public is sour, because in the end, the finer points did not reach them, while the betrayal of their homes and futures has crushed them

Romney did not lose in this pathetic exchange, but his minions lost much. To speak as they did about Palin shows they do not understand her strengths.

The Tea Party is a collection of angry citizens who are certain they are being ignored. They were created by the callous contempt of the ‘Townhalls’ where the citizens found the even press mocked them

Palin is the only major player who goes to the Tea Party and listens.

That is it in a nutshell. For people who know they are being used like dirty kleenex by their elected officials, there is one way to gain trust, and only Palin was willing to shake hands with the riff-raff.

The angry public already had to eat the fine points, in spades

The next candidate must be able to disassociate himself from the fine-pointers. He must be able to prove he is willing to return the power to the people.

Thus the arguments will be about liberty, and empowerment. The Tea Party knows a huge national debt is enslavement of future generations.

Presently we have a President who cringes at the idea of love of country.

But country is all the riff raff have, their vote, a picture of their foreclosed homes, a memory of the job before small business was driven out by policy leaving only the big cold hearted globalist giants

Dr Z has diagnosed correctly what is needed:

They must learn to focus their will against a leviathan State that has no intention of dying quietly. Like Sarah Palin, they must be ready for their very humanity to be questioned, through dark insinuations of greed and racism.

It bodes badly for Mitt his minions are so short sighted. The hits on Palin land right on the Tea Party

What really strikes me as odd about Romney is that he could use Romneycare to his advantage. He could sell it as an experiment at the state level where experiments should be, and he could tell us why it failed and what mistakes he made. He could tell us that though we might have the best of intentions, it’s quite possible that any program might end up being run by democratics, and perverted and twisted into something we did not intend, and he has learned we have to guard against that. We have to write legislation purposefully to block the accumulation of power over time by the progressives, because inevitably, power will flipflop to the other side someday.

Instead he seems content to sit back, -okay, making the occasional snipe, but mostly he seems to hope that we will forget about Romneycare. Maybe he hopes Obamacare succeeds and will redeem Romneycare. He could convince us that his experience has taught him that socialized medicine is a loser, if he believes that. Whatever his strategy is, it’s not working.

What, exactly, are the criteria for being considered a “serious human being?”

welcome to the epistemic morass of a college sophomore’s dorm room.

“how do you know how you know what knowing is? woaaaahhh.”

let me clear away the ambiguity for you. she’s a f**king clown. and a dummy.

I would think raising a Downs-syndrome child would earn her a certain degree of automatic credit for seriousness. It’s certainly not the kind of thing a frivolous human being would do.

you’d be surprised how many brain-damaged crack babies are brought to full term and named after liquor brands on a daily basis. i don’t know much about the quality of folks palin is. i know more than i desire to already. for instance, i know that her grandchild was concieved on the sticky carpeting of a meth-lab floor. the attempt to portray the act of getting pregnant as some sort of distinguishing achievement which imparts one with moral rigor and nobility had to be the most imbecillic thing i’ve read today.

Romney should begin his campaign by firing anyone who maintains a Daily Kos diary.

“dur-a-hur! your not a palin apologist so your a liebruhl!!!”

what a goddamn phony. you’r tl:dr typings remind me of one of these ivy-league bow-tied shcmucks who heads the foreign afairs department at a $40k/yr university and writes articles for contentions about how the people who question palin’s suitability for office are “ivory tower elitists” or some such bulls**t.

Now if you could please pen an open letter to Bristol Palin cataloging(sp?) and explaining just how reprehensible her behavior has been and how her self-centered behavior may have dark ramifications for the entire future of the United States.

Romney failed to speak out against Obamacare because he’d have looked like a blithering moron trying to explain why it wasn’t good for the nation even though he signed it into law in mass-uh-chew-sits.

gryphon202 on July 16, 2010 at 3:22 AM

I’m no Mittens fan either, but I think he could have saved himself on tenth amendment grounds. He could have said “We passed this in MA because the people wanted it. However, there is no provision in the Constitution that gives the federal government the authority to pass this bill.” That would have saved him. Instead, he hid until it was safe to come out and even then licked his finger and stuck it up in the air before he did.

A comprehensive knowledge of America’s socialist history, from inception to its current death throes, will be required.

Oh yeah – and for that matter, a re-introduction to the whole and true American history, especially exploring the ideas of the Founders and the issues they debated, showing how they came to agree on the Constitution.

Let’s start with Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, and David Barton’s Setting the Story Striaght: American History in Black and White.

Amen Herb. Americans are sick and tired of being bombarded with verbal ledgerdemain(sp?) and legalese camoflauge. Most of us are crying out to hear answers that are short and to the point. With Sarah there’s no BS. Even when she tries to be a bit too diplomatic in her delivery you always know where she is coming from. She might be a bit long-winded sometimes but one must remember that she is very cognizant of the fact that she has to walk on eggshells lest the media pounce upon every perceived mispronounciation. Every publicly uttered “God Bless you” to a stranger’s sneeze is a potential PR minefield for her.

What was she suppose to do? Let the completely bogus Ethics charges from an ObaMao lackey bankrupt her family, at the same time they made it imposable for her to govern Alaska.

Buy a clue, and grow up.

Slowburn

Sorry, Slowburn, but only the childish insult people they disagree with. So your suggestion to grow up seems a bit misplaced. As for Palin, I understand what she was going through. So far as I know, she was not unique in that regard. Many politicians have to deal with harassment. But the tough ones hang in there. Anyway, like I wrote before, I admire Palin and her ideas. I just wish she had more experience governing than talking.

Serious candidate?? That’s a nice idea but unfortunately in presidential and other elections, charisma and other factors often rules. The best example of that is the meteoric rise of Obama to the presidency although he was anything but a ‘serious’ candidate. Even G.W. Bush could not be considered a very serious candidate as he ran for his first term but he was a likable person which gained him many votes.

I really believe that many if not most American voters consider other conditions, their feelings perhaps, rather than how serious a candidate is when they cast their vote and party affiliation is one of them (so easy to vote by checking only the party box).

If only Palin had remained as Alaska’s governor I would have deemed her a serious candidate. When Obama was charged with having no executive experience at least Palin was governor for a short time. If she had remained governor and used the time to study international affairs while honing her executive skills, I’d take her seriously. But to be known only as an effective speaker just puts her on par with Obama. I certainly respect and admire Palin. I even share most of her philosophy. But we need someone with experience in the White House, not another Obama.

NNtrancer on July 16, 2010 at 10:17 AM

It would be quite simple to call you an idiot, and move on, but that would be too easy, wouldn’t it.

If you don’t understnd why she handed the reins of her government over to Sean Parnell, then you shouldn’t even be commenting on t.

As for “experience” the woman has two decades of executive experience. She didn’t just wonder in off the streets and become governor. In fact, she has more CEO experience than anyone even thinking about running for POTUS.

Sarah Palin is toxic. She is not a moron, but she is a rambling, chaotic, run-on sentence (I challenge you to read a transcript of any recent interview without pulling your hair out). She does not seem to be a deep or quick thinker, and she is not the person I want to lead us back from the snowballing statism that is picking up steam. And most of all, I fear that she is less “electable”, not because of her gender but because of the perception (by both the left and the right) that she is not overly bright.

But hey, what do I know?

lionheart on July 16, 2010 at 12:02 PM

You too fall into the idiot category, with a healthy splash of moron thrown in.

Where is she “toxic”? Only to progressives. She has 20 points worth of favorability, on any other GOP’er, and does very well with indies. That’s all one needs to win the presidency.

Doesn’t surprise me to see Romney in on something like this. Always struck me as a weasel…made of plastic no less. As far as reforming government, Sarah Palin has a lot to prove.
Her record in Alaska along with her electrifying personality gave me hope. However, her continued presence at the side of John McCain, who is symbolic of the institutional arrogance and waste of our government tells me that she is in the process of learning all the wrong lessons about what to do once she gets to Washington. McCain’s behavior during amnesty, ie characterizing his opponents as stupid and bigoted because they disagree with him, as well as his assault on the first amendment with his McCain-Feingold legislation puts him solidly in the camp of ‘Do as I say and shut the f*ck up’ governance. If we truly are serious about reform, career hack politicians like John McCain need to be voted out. Young up and comers like Sarah Palin need to stay closer to their base and attack politicians like McCain.
Palin had the chance to let Arizona make a good decision and dump McCain. She made sure, personally, that this did not happen. That puts her squarely in the corner of business as usual in DC.
The Tea Party wants reform, while politicians just want to keep getting elected. Which is the priority? If it truly is reform, better find some better candidates. Lesser of two evils ain’t gonna cut it no more.

austinnelly on July 16, 2010 at 12:28 PM

What is this, moron day at Hot Air???

You are as clueless as the come. Sarah has been a reformer since her earliest days on the Wasilla council!

She went after corruption while at the AOGCC, and when Murkowski protected his boys, she resigned in protest, and started in on them as a private citizens. These were REPUBLICANS. She took em all on, and took em down.

As Governor she teamed up with the FBI and went after even more.

Don’t tell me she doesn’t know how to reform. She reformed government in Alaska big time.

After she finished cleaning house, she went after the oil companies, forcing them to clean up their acts.